Tips for Using Old Books and Papers in Art Journaling

From time to time I receive questions from blog readers, Pinterest followers, Etsy customers, and members from groups I belong to. So I want to take some time throughout this month to answer some of them in a series of blog posts. I'll start with old books since so much of this started here for me.

The first time I made an altered book art journal I was hooked. I started going to book sales and buying books, making journals, using the book pages on my art journal pages, and stacking up books in my studio/office. I started my Etsy Shop, {found on brighton}, as a way to use up the books and leftover insides that were accumulating in my house.

So, what do I do with the book pages? It is quite rare that I make an art journal page where book text isn't peaking out of it somewhere, in some way. I love the look of book text in my backgrounds peaking out through subtle layers of gesso or paint.

I like to cut shapes and letters out of painted book paper.

Or make mosaics.

So these are some of the ways I use old books and book paper in my art journaling. Altered book journals and themed paper packs are available in my Etsy shop.

Are there ways you use books or book paper in your art journaling different than the ways I listed?

30 Day Blogging Challenge Day 7. I missed posting yesterday, so now they are not consecutive. But I press on with the challenge!

Collage Play

I have numerous art mediums that I enjoy: painting, lettering, watercolor, photography, etc. It is the use of multiple art mediums and combining them that makes art journaling so appealing to me. It sure keeps things from getting boring!

I think, however, that collage is probably one of my favorite art mediums. I really can get lost in adhering paper pieces to a page! This summer I found an old atlas at a book sale that has an incredible color palette, so I made some collage backgrounds using the map pages. Here are a few of the pages I have been playing with:

No map paper on this one.

I then added another of my favorite mediums - letters cut from painted papers. I usually just take photos of my art with my camera and edit in PSE, but I have read on some blogs that people also scan their art. So I tried that with the same art piece to see the difference.

Scan

Photo

The scan definitely turned out much better and I like that I can fill the full frame with the photo. I will say that I took my photo in early morning when the natural light is not the best in my room. I'll have to try my experiment again with afternoon light and see the difference. 

That's it for me today. What's your favorite art medium for play?

30 Day Blogging Challenge day 5.

His Kingdom Come Blog Hop, Announcement and Giveaway

Welcome to a very exciting blog hop.  Today His Kingdom Come is celebrating the launch of a brand new faithart stencil & mask line “Praise Him” designed by Diane Marra.

His Kingdom Come has created tools to help draw you into God's presence and lead you deeper into creative living. faithart tools help create art with the intention of connecting with God.

His Kingdom Come faithart tools help you exercise the artistic gifts God has bestowed upon each of us. These faithart tools allow you to work together with God to discover the creative, holy and abundant faithart He has placed upon your heart! Join His Kingdom Come in creative expressions of faith!

His Kingdom Come showcases faithart products designed by Christian artists who know and love God and are passionate about sharing their faithart. Our faithart products include canvas ephemera, stamps, stencils/masks and Thermofax screens.

A team of talented HKC artists have come together to launch these exciting new stencils & masks.  This blog hop is your chance to get to see how these artists have used them in their faithart.

It doesn’t matter where you start within the blog hop.   Or you can start at the beginning at His Kingdom Come. Each blog has the complete list of participants.

His Kingdom Come

Diane Marra

Penny Bragg

Pearl Brown

Bernice Hopper

Mary Brack

Kathy Shaull

Tricia Berg

Paula Parkison

Shonna Bucaroff

As you visit each blog you will be given a letter eg. D.   When you have collected all the letters they will make a word.  When you have worked out the word email Bernice with the word.  We will randomly choose 4 people who have the correct answer to win a free stencil of their choice.   All entries must arrive by Noon (Pacific time) on Tuesday 23^rd June.

The letter to collect from my blog is  "U"

How I used the "Praise the Lord" stencil/mask:

Confession time: I don't typically use people in my art journaling pages but I'm always up for a challenge! I wanted to use the stencil in my own style which usually includes collage. To start I collaged a variety of papers to make the background.

I trimmed the edges and then covered the paper with gesso and a bit of pale blue-green around the edges and across the bottom half.

Next I took a piece of gesso covered music paper and taped the stencil in place. Using a few colors of Tim Holtz Distressed Ink pads and a blending tool the shape of the praising lady began to appear.

I then cut the shape out and gave it a few spritzes of water to set off the ink.

Going back to my background page, I gathered some painted paper scraps to create beams of a sunburst - something I often use to symbolize God's glory. I cut the painted papers into strips and glued them in place on the top half of the page. I glued the praising woman onto a heavier piece of paper and cut her out again. Having the heavier paper behind her prevents the outlines of the papers underneath from showing through.

I wrote Psalm on the page and then cut letters out of painted papers to add holy, holy, holy across the sunbeams.

And there you have my way of using a stencil with collage. I hope you enjoy the blog hop and find your way of using our faithart products.

We hope you are as excited as we are about this new product line from His Kingdom Come, an online creative community, a place where you can find encouragement, share your heart and receive prayer and inspiration!

To join our community please visit His Kingdom Come

Prize winners will be announced on the His Kingdom Come Blog on Wednesday 24^th June.

Collage Therapy

There has not been much time for making art over the past ten days or so. The end of the school year has kept me very busy with the school our church has adopted. An exciting thing that happened last week was that our public school system held a meeting pulling their faith based partners together. We adopted a public school ten years ago and have long had a dream of seeing a church connected with each of the 40 elementary schools. Our new superintendent has been very open to this and we are now halfway to our goal. It was a great half-day event hearing the stories of the many different ways the partner churches are serving the schools. As much as I love networking and being at events such as this, as an introvert, I find that once the adrenaline wears off my energy just drains from my mind and my body and leaks out through my toes. The hard part about this past week was that after having events during the day each day, I then had events in the evenings. Not much time or energy left for creativity! 

I have had an idea floating around in my head for quite some time that I finally started putting to paper before this 10 day stretch of activity. So each day I tried to sit down for 10 or 15 or 30 minutes and do a little work on my page. I love collage and taking pieces of paper and making a design with them. I have taken magazine paper or painted papers and made sunburst designs to serve as backgrounds.

I even collaged circles inside a sunburst.

I have collaged strips of paper to fill a page or to simply make borders.

I have used pieces of paper to make objects, such as the nest on this page.

And of course I have collaged circles.

The idea that has been in my head for quite a while is to use paper to collage a mosaic or stained glass effect. So in the little bits of time this past week I cut small pieces of painted papers and glued them into a design...

And that became my page for this week's Take Me Deeper devotion.

Now, I realize that this may seem tedious and a lot of work for an art journal page background, but it is amazing to me how therapeutic cutting and gluing little pieces of paper can be. So throughout this busy stretch those bits of time were like being on an oasis during a long desert journey. Those bits of time each day would refresh me. Those bits of time in the evening combined with time in prayer and the Bible each morning restored the energy I need to keep the busy pace of a long stretch of high activity. And now that I finally got that idea out of my head, I'm quite pleased with it and looking forward to doing more. 

Last weekend the His Kingdom Come Foundation Team launched a collaborative class that we did together while on our retreat last month in Florida. The class is called The Zigzag Postcard Book and we each taught the others how to do a technique which then became five postcards and the basis for the book. I taught the other ladies how to do a paper collage sunburst - big surprise, huh?! Here are some glimpses of the book I put together. I used Psalm 51 as a theme for my book. What was really fun was how different all five books ended up.

If you would like to participate in the class you can pop over to the His Kingdom Come website. You will need to join the site, which is free, in order to sign up for the class. And while you're there consider joining our weekly devotion and faithart challenge, Take Me Deeper. We offer a weekly devotion with Bible study ideas and challenge our group to express what they read and studied through their favorite creative medium. Shameless plugs, I know!

Enjoy your holiday today!

Sanctuary

Do you ever experience times where information comes at you in multiple ways as though life were trying to give you a message? Times where it feels as though a billboard is repeatedly placed in the path of your journey at every turn? Over the many years I have been following Christ I have come to recognize these times - these billboard signs plopped down in my path - as ways God uses to try to get my attention to some message that He has deemed important and vital to my journey. You see, I am an independent, I-can-do-things-myself kind of a woman, and I trudge along thinking "I got this", when in reality I don't. And God must use billboards, repeatedly plopped down in my path, to get my attention so that I pay attention to what He is trying to tell me and to where He is trying to lead me. Is it any wonder that I deal with issues of burnout! Over the past few months God has been trying to get my attention.

So our Take Me Deeper theme for the month of May in the His Kingdom Come community is called Sanctuary. (This will all connect,I promise!) The content of this month's devotions are topics that have been ruminating in my heart and soul for the past few years in my journey of self-discovery and dealing with burnout. I have touched on many of these topics in my blog posts, as beginning this blog was one of the ways for me to formulate and organize my thoughts during this journey. Writing the devotions for May really helped me pull it all together in an organized manner. I tend to grasp at the many threads that float in my mind and the discipline of writing a month of themed devotions has become so beneficial for me in pulling all my loose threads together. The theme of Sanctuary is about finding the places in our lives where we experience refuge, rest and respite in God's presence and making habits of dwelling in our place of sanctuary so that we live holy and healthy lives - healthy emotionally, spiritually and physically. I have to admit, that for me, the physical part has taken longer for me to be convicted about. And in the month since I wrote those devotions I realize that I did not touch on that area much in those writings. It is in this area - physical health - that God has been placing billboards in my path. It is in my place of sanctuary and the times of dwelling in God's presence that the threads all come together.

The billboards:

• This past fall I started looking at  my personality type in relationship to the issues that are brought about by stress and crisis-like circumstances. In the Myers-Briggs personality type world how you respond to stress and crisis-like circumstances is referred to as "in the grip". Being in the grip causes you to respond in manners that are not compatible with your personality type. In other words you may respond in a manner that  doesn't feel like you are being yourself. I read a few articles that helped me see this and that gave suggestions, based  on your personality type, for getting balance back. I read that INFJ's benefit from engaging in regular exercise and that it can be effective for regulating mood, quieting the mind and calming emotions. In addition, being outside and engaging your senses are also helpful in regulating mood and calming emotions.
• About that time I also stumbled on a quote that is credited to Augustine: "Solvitur Ambuland = It is solved by walking."
• This winter I began reading "How to Beat Burnout" by Minirth & Meier. They advocate making changes in the physical areas of one's life first. "Just feeling better physically often begins to change a person's burned out emotions and gives them the strength to begin other changes - physical, emotional, and spiritual."
• Recently I picked up a book I had stopped reading, "Invitation to Solitude and Silence" by Ruth Haley Barton. She says that our "spiritual journey is taken in a physical body, and there is a very real connection between caring for our body and deepening our relationship with God." She goes on to say that, "Learning to rest into God in times of solitude begins with the body."

When I prayed about and chose my word for this year, renew, I know that one area of my life that needed to be renewed was my physical health. These different billboards are convincing me that the importance here is more than just simply losing some weight - that hasn't motivated me enough in the past. The importance is that physical health is beneficial to my emotional and spiritual health. Dealing with issues of burnout have made me look closely at the importance of my emotional health and energy. Much of what I have been reading indicates that good emotional health really benefits from good physical health. I have much to explore as I dig into Scripture and look at how God views our physical body in relationship to our spiritual life and growing in spiritual maturity. 

My first art journal page for May's theme:

I didn't post much last month, so here are my art journal pages from the last three weeks of April's theme, The Resurrection Life:

From Death to Life

Power For Living

Living Hope

We have quite a community growing at His Kingdom Come and it's great seeing how everyone expresses the devotions in so many different creative mediums. There is so much talent in this group! Check out our community at His Kingdom Come.